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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088912">Dirty Old Town</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus'>AconitumNapellus</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Friendship, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-09 02:55:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,351</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088912</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Illya is still very new to New York, and Napoleon is determined to get him to love the place.</p><p>This is either gen, or pre-slash, as you prefer to read it. It's as gen as the TV series is. A standalone work, no plans for now for expanding or sequels.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Illya Kuryakin &amp; Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>64</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dirty Old Town</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
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      <span>‘<span><span>I wonder what you like about this dirty city.’</span></span></span>
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          <span>Illya kicks at a bottle, and it rolls across the pavement into the gutter with a dull clink. There’s so much rubbish here. So much filth. So much crime. He remembers the spires of Cambridge rising from an early morning mist. Of course sometimes there was paper on the streets, or bits of broken glass, but not like this. He remembers the rising sun shining on the blond stone, making it gold. He remembers the sound of choirboys practising in the churches, their song peeling clear as the bells through the clear air.</span>
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          <span>Here, a car horn sounds. Someone shouts in another language – Italian, he thinks. It’s probably a curse. He files away the words to research later. It’s good to increase his repertoire.</span>
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          <span>A dog is barking. Engines grumble through the streets, and somewhere there is a siren. The air smells of petrol and rotting rubbish.</span>
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      <span>‘<span><span>What I like about it?’ Napoleon asks him, looking around. ‘Illya, this dirty city is a jewel.’</span></span></span>
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          <span>Illya snorts. He thinks of Kyiv, and its wide, straight streets. The war was hard, but they made the best of it afterwards. People wouldn’t dream of treating their home like this. He remembers the posters pasted up, urging people to not litter, to not desecrate nature. Here, no one seems to care.</span>
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</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘What would they do,’ he wonders, ‘if you had bills posted, telling people not to litter?’</p><p class="text-body-indent">Napoleon snorts. ‘Graffiti over them. Tear them down. People need the freedom to – ’</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Freedom?’ Illya breaks in. ‘Is this your freedom? Freedom to treat your home like dirt?’</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Freedom not to be dragged off to the gulag for dropping a candy wrapper,’ Napoleon retorts.</p><p class="text-body-indent">Illya feels startled; stung. The words wake something in him. He grew up with a fear in him so ingrained that he barely even thought about it. <em>Don’t step out of line. Don’t put your head above the parapet. Please, Illyusha, haven’t we lost enough?</em></p><p class="text-body-indent">He shakes his head, and sighs.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘There’s a – sense of dislocation in me,’ he admits.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Between here and – the Soviet Union?’ Napoleon asks. ‘Illya, haven’t you lived in the west for – ’</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘<span>More than</span> a decade,’ he nods. ‘Two years in Paris, seven in Cambridge, a couple of years split between London and Berlin. The west is not America, Napoleon. Not at all. There are more similarities between Russia and England than you would think. Cultural similarities. The way we think.’</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘The English are communists?’ Napoleon asks him playfully.</p><p class="text-body-indent">Illya shakes his head, not catching the playfulness.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Not at all. Just similarities in the way we approach life.’</p><p class="text-body-indent">He is trying to smooth his accent down after these months in the United States. He had never bothered so much in Paris or Cambridge, and he grew used to being able to use his language at will in Berlin. Now he feels the need to smooth out the more Russian elements of his speech, because it gives him away at every turn. He is learning to create a pearled shell to protect himself from the hostility directed towards the threat of the Soviet Bloc.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘I was more recently in Berlin,’ he reminds Napoleon. ‘That was a little more like home, depending on which side of the wall one chose…’</p><p class="text-body-indent">Napoleon regards him with a thoughtful expression.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Berlin must have been – ’</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Berlin,’ Illya muses. ‘Berlin – was fascinating.’</p><p class="text-body-indent">Berlin was a wonder. He had slipped between East and West with a facility most could only dream of, due to his position as a Soviet sanctioned member of U.N.C.L.E. He had been able to show his pass and cross into places where it was as common to hear Russian spoken as German. He had been able to indulge his nostalgia on one side of the wall, and his decadence on the other. It had been a strange, schizophrenic time.</p><p class="text-body-indent">He remembers some of the bars in that place. West Berlin. Late evening. Going to the Nollendorfplatz and having his eyes opened in so many ways. There were things possible in Berlin that had never been sanctioned in England, and could have got him exiled in the Soviet Union.</p><p class="text-body-indent">Napoleon links an arm into his, and Illya looks at him, startled. They have been walking along these streets for the last ten minutes. They have been partnered for the last two months. He had been over here a couple of times before he was permanently reassigned, but living in this city is different to short visits, and being partnered with Napoleon is different to seeing him across a briefing table, or swapping words in the commissary. At first Napoleon had seemed brash, all glitter and front, just like this city. As time goes on, he is starting to see something underneath the dazzle. It’s something he likes.</p><p class="text-body-indent">He likes the feeling of Napoleon’s arm linked in his. He likes the solidity of it, the security of it. He likes the feeling of Napoleon’s blood heat pressing through his jacket sleeve, through Illya’s own, into his arm. Napoleon is a warm man, expressive, impulsive, but always controlled. He’s a man of mercurial contradiction, a man he can rely upon entirely. He would trust, and has trusted, his life in Napoleon’s hands.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Come on,’ Napoleon says. ‘Down here.’</p><p class="text-body-indent">Illya is yet to know his way around all the streets and alleys of Manhattan. He is trying to learn them. Slowly, he is building up his network, fixing a visual map of the city firmly in his head. It grows like veins through a leaf. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens. He wants to know every street, every passage, every manhole, every subway vent.</p><p class="text-body-indent">‘Where are we going?’ Illya asks.</p><p class="text-body-indent">He doesn’t like the uncertainty of not knowing. He doesn’t know this part of the city at all.</p><p>‘Aha,’ Napoleon says, glancing at him, tapping his finger to the side of his nose.</p><p>‘Napoleon, seriously,’ Illya complains, pulling back a little against his arm.</p><p>Does it feel unnatural, to walk arm in arm like this? Should he withdraw? Should he carry on as if he walks with all his friends like this? Is Napoleon now his friend? Is this what they have become?</p><p>As if he’s sensing this, Napoleon tightens his grip. Illya’s arm is pressed between Napoleon’s arm and his flank. A curious feeling, this. A pleasant feeling.</p><p>‘Look,’ Napoleon says as they cross a quiet street. ‘Look at the lights.’</p><p>Night is draping itself over the city. The sky is a dark rust-blue. Far down the straight street, where the buildings rise into shards of stone and glass, the place sparkles with light.</p><p>‘I will give you that,’ Illya nods, pausing in his step. ‘It is a sight to behold.’ He glances at Napoleon and says tartly, ‘And I cannot see the dirt in the dark.’</p><p>Napoleon laughs softly.</p><p>‘There are some benefits to darkness.’</p><p>Illya can feel the heaviness of his weapon under his jacket. He knows Napoleon can feel the same. Their U.N.C.L.E. issue revolvers, fully loaded, snug at their sides. He wouldn’t want to walk the streets at night without a gun. Not here. Not in their line of work.</p><p>‘This is where I’m taking you,’ Napoleon says, twitching Illya’s arm sideways.</p><p>They turn in towards railings, steps that lead down, a door that’s propped open with an old brick. From inside Illya can hear live jazz. He can smell the mingling of cigarette smoke and good food. This is a jazz club he didn’t know about. He feels a moment of surprise that Napoleon knows it. Napoleon has never struck him as the type.</p><p>‘No, but I knew you’d like it,’ Napoleon says.</p><p>It’s as if he has read Illya’s mind. As if he knows about the records under Illya’s bed. There’s all the warmth of a summer evening in his voice. All the generosity of an innocent child.</p><p>‘Come on in,’ Napoleon tells him, as if he’s suggesting that the water is lovely. ‘And I will make a New Yorker of you, one jewel at a time.’</p>
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